


Between oranges and apples

by SharpestRose



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-07
Updated: 2011-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:32:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wondered if the people had been glad to have their cleansed world free of vermin in the end, even if it meant they lost their children in the process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between oranges and apples

The school library always had a vague smell of oranges. Later, she would discover that this was due to the citrus-based cleaning fluid used to strip the books of old, yellowed binding tape when they were repaired, but at ten years old it was just one of the things that was. She liked smells, they were informative and unearthly things. Her mother on the first Saturday night of the month, mom and dad's date night. The soft new-plastic smell of her my little pony toys. The orange-tree scent of the library.

She liked the geography books, the glossy photos of places far away.

"I'm going to be an explorer," she told the little boy sitting opposite her in the soft half-circle of bright cushions strewn on the floor for reading on. "I'm going to have adventures."

The boy gave a serious nod. He had short red hair that bristled up like a wary cat. She wanted to count how many freckles he had.

"I'm Stephen," he said.

"I'm Marie," she answered. "How many freckles do you have?"

"My brother says I've got a million. But I'm too little to have enough skin for a million freckles. I was born premature, they kept me in a plastic box until I realised I'd been born and started breathing properly."

"They had to cut my mom's stomach open to get me out," she said. "But that's pretty ordinary."

"Nothin' wrong with ordinary." The boy's voice sounded strangely wistful. Then he smiled, and showed her the book he was reading. Fairy stories and tales of wonder. It was an old book, and the orange smell was thick around its yellowing pages. She wondered if old books turned into oranges if they were left for long enough.

"This book is interesting," he said. "The butler killed a man with an icicle and nobody could find the weapon, because it melted."

"That's neat," she said with a smile. "Real clever. Did he get away with it?"

"Yeah."

"Cool."

Stephen wasn't at school anymore after that. She heard her dad say that a boy from the area had been asked to leave by the mayor because the boy was a mutant. She wondered if the boy was Stephen, but Stephen had smelt like an ordinary person and had a brother and read about murder mysteries, so it couldn't have been him.

The book was older and more yellowed and smelt more like oranges when she was thirteen, but by then she knew about the cleaning fluids and didn't suspect it of transforming into fruit. The story about the butler and the icicle made her smile, she no longer remembered the circumstances of the boy's departure and recalled only a pleasant hour spent in his company once upon a time.

She borrowed the book and read it sprawled on her bed, the sound of her mother practicing piano scales downstairs drifting up. Her mom hardly ever got a chance to play the piano, so it was slow going for her to learn stuff.

There was a version of Little Red Riding Hood, but it wasn't the same as the ones in the picture books she'd had since she was a baby. This was an old version, where the wolf and the hooded girl found an odd camaraderie in the wild. When Little Red got to grandmother's house, the wolf was waiting in the bed, and told her to throw her cloak onto the fire.

She didn't like this version of the story. The wolf had never frightened her, even in her earliest days of listening to fairy tales, but the thought of that pretty red cape thrown to the flames disturbed her. Somehow, the hood and cloak had always seemed a kind of talisman against danger and fear in the story. And now the fire had stripped that away, removed the careful defenses the girl needed to live behind.

The next story was the pied piper, which made her shudder with the image of a town overrun with rats. She wondered if the people had been glad to have their cleansed world free of vermin in the end, even if it meant they lost their children in the process. It seemed a strangely discomforting story, surprising because she'd always been a little fond of it in earlier times. The piper seemed so alluring, with his merry dance and bewitching song.

Then the little match girl, freezing cold out in the snow and lighting tiny fires to imagine things by.

The heat of the afternoon and the steady repetition of her mother's playing lulled her into dozing, and in her dreams the little match girl was red riding hood grown up. And maybe it was all right that she'd burnt her cloak after all, because the fire was looking after her now. All she'd had to do was trust it.

And in her dreams the little match girl didn't freeze to death outside the lighted room she couldn't visit, for the snow was as safe as the fire so long as the girl knew it so.

She woke up, her cheek warm and reddened from resting against the book. Her hair smelt like oranges all afternoon.

When she was fifteen her english class studied _the Chrysalids_ and she'd found herself imagining Sophie with red hair and a million freckles. The story had seemed unendurably sad, having six toes seemed such a little difference and poor Sophie was doomed for it. They'd only been working through the book for two lessons when the class was given a new teacher. The old one was asked to leave, her father mentioned one night at dinner.

At seventeen she sat cross-legged on the floor of the common room, munching on popcorn and watching Polonia brothers movies. They were working through the entire oeuvre, much to the disgust and despair of all the other kids who wanted to use the room.

"You're eating ice cream," John said.

"You're very observant, aren't you?" Bobby replied. "It's coconut, want some?"

"Isn't it overkill for you to eat ice cream? You don't see me ordering that thing where they light the banana on fire, do you?"

"Bombe alaska," she offered. "I think that's the one you're thinking of. And they don't always use bananas."

"Thanks, little miss pays-attention-in-class," John said. "You get a nice shiny spoon so you can crib bits off everyone else's plate."

"Shut up and watch the movie, John." Bobby tossed the empty ice cream cup into the wastepaper basket.

Sometimes John did stupid things. He liked to piss people off, which in itself didn't bother her so much because it could be kinda funny, but after all the stuff she'd gone through she didn't relish the notion of dying in a big fire or whatever.

And Bobby was the perfect, ridiculously perfect, foil for John, of course, with icy wind to counteract the stupider schemes John pulled. But Bobby wasn't always there, and sometimes John would decide, hey, let's snap all the electrical cables leading into the school by burning them through, wouldn't that be great? Or making all the candles on a kid's birthday cake skitter out of the way when the child tried to blow them out. Stupid, silly games that made John giggle and always caused some larger problem soon enough.

So sometimes it was up to her, and it made her remember being a kid and sticking pins into party balloons. If you knew how, the right places to drive the point in, you could let the air out easy and seal it off with tape when you were done. But if you hadn't learnt the trick, the balloon would burst and leave you surprised and empty handed. She'd spent her time at the school learning the intricacies of how to handle her power, how to press the pin in with minimal damage. She knew how to do that now, a hand on his forearm that just looked to anyone watching like she was warning him back from something, while the pull-tug-suck feeling coursed up her nerves like a static shock and left John pale and jittery.

"I hate it when you pull that shit, Rogue," he'd complain later, steadying his nerves by playing with his lighter and chewing on his thumbnail. "It feels disgusting, you know. No offence or anything, but it's the foulest."

"So don't screw around so much," she would retort. She felt guilty, though, because she knew that he really did hate it a lot, and it wasn't exactly her favourite passtime either. Maybe she just needed to lighten up and let him play his jokes.

It had taken her a long time to puzzle out the reasons why Bobby was so insecure, because from the outside he seemed so charmed. But the outside and the inside were, well, opposite sides, right? And Bobby was always sure he was the second prize. Sure his parents liked his brother more, sure that his power was lame compared to what other students could do. She knew he hated that she cared so much about Logan, but she wasn't going to end up playing nursemaid and soothing all Bobby's worries. Let him get a clue and realise that she'd agreed to be his official, public, initials-carved-in-a-loveheart-on-the-desk girlfriend, and that this should be validation enough even for one as unsure as him.

She wouldn't kiss him, though. Wouldn't touch. Couldn't bear to think of hurting him just by wanting to be close. It was all so very unfair, but she'd stopped thinking in fair and unfair terms now. It was just the way it was.

"You touch John," Bobby would say, sounding a little bit hurt. Never more than a little bit, always holding back anything bigger or more destructive he might feel. His sweetness made her happy and sad all at once.

"Only when I have to," she'd answer. "You know that. I just..."

"It doesn't matter." Bobby's smile always made her feel like her heart was made of ice under pressure, little cracks running across the surface quick as thought. And it did matter, it mattered in a thousand confusing ways.

When she'd been small, she'd thought _love triangle_ just meant three people in love. Three points, three sides. Logical. But then she'd gotten older and understood that what it really meant was two people together and one on the outside, or two people pulling one person in different directions. Nothing comforting about that, nothing logical and easy.

Even so, she'd like to believe the childish supposition of the meaning would be possible, somehow. Someday. Somewhere. But for now she's just stuck in the middle of all sorts of stuff, and it's more like the second definition of the term than she imagined anything in the real world could be.

Because it's always one on the outside and two on the inside, the positions switching but the dynamic the same, and it's so unfair it could make her scream out loud. It's her with her hand on John's arm because he's being a smartass jerk again and Bobby on the outside who doesn't get to touch her at all. It's John swearing up and down that he doesn't do that malt shoppe dating shit and that the two of them can have their proms and their going steady and then watching them with eyes as hungry as the little match girl must have had in the fairy story. It's her sitting on the floor while John and Bobby scuffle and play and act like overgrown puppies on the couch while they all watch crappy horror movies.

And she can call the shots, play the whitebread teenage version of a dominatrix in the dorm when nobody else is around and say 'kiss him' and 'harder' and watch John arch and scrabble at the sheets, and do his hands ever stop moving and fidgeting because she doesn't think she's ever seen them still. And Bobby's not vanilla, she knows that's what Jubilee and Kitty and the others call him when he's not around, he's coconut, which looks the same as vanilla from the outside but is as rich as any caramel on the tongue. They're perfect together, like bookends or opposites, and watching them is more strange and exciting and lovely than anything she's ever imagined.

But that's all she can do. Watch as John's smooth skin goes goosebumps under Bobby's cool breath, watch as John's sardonic mouth licks and nips and sucks at Bobby's fingertips. Watch and watch and watch, and it's not fucking _fair_.

But that's just how it is.

Sometimes she gets a weekend pass and heads down into New York City, the anonymity agrees with her and she enjoys going to the shops, buying new clothes because she's still growing up, still not fully formed into the person she's going to be. She says 'thanks' for the bags at the counter and the clerk stops her, a hand on her gloved wrist and she has to fight the instinct to flinch away.

"Hey, where're you from?" the clerk asks.

"Westchester," she answers.

"No, I mean originally. Your accent," the clerk explains patiently. She blushes.

"Oh, right. Mississippi," she says with a smile. And it's weird, because in her head she's honestly and truly from Westchester now. And she thinks that might be significant but leaves the existential ponderings on the subject for another time.

When she gets back to the school she finds John and Bobby sitting on the low wall bordering one of the ornamental gardens, crunching on slices of apple and discussing whether some actress they'd seen in a tv show was a mutant.

"Come on, you don't seriously think they build humans like that, do you?" John asked. "With the curves and that face and... hi, Rogue."

"Hi," she says, holding her laugh in behind her smile.

"You know, some of my best friends are humans," Bobby points out diplomatically, giving her a piece of the apple. It tastes sharp and acidic and cold and wonderful.

"I'm not dissing the species, I'm just saying that the best booty's mutie."

She and Bobby groan in unison and push John backwards so he falls onto the soft manicured grass. He lands with an oof and blinks in surprise, then starts laughing. The pair of them flop onto their backs beside him a second later, the sky a dark dusky blue above them. This is her home and, for a slow sweet moment, the triangle balances.


End file.
